Leveled by Landslide, Towns Mull How to Rebuild

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Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, met Tuesday at the Oso Community Chapel with people struggling with the landslide’s effects on the local economy and infrastructure. With part of a crucial state road buried, and waterways having shifted, residents feel newly aware of the dangers of life in the area.CreditMatthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

OSO, Wash. — A sometimes awkward, invariably agonized conversation about the future has begun here at the site of last month’s devastating landslide, about what might be rebuilt and what was perhaps forever lost that day.

It is a delicate chemistry, responders and residents say, with the needs of the families grieving or looking for their loved ones — 39 people were killed by the slide, with four others still missing — balanced against the needs of the many other families and businesses struggling with the slide’s aftereffects on the local economy, the transportation system and the environment.

“We’re doing what a family would do: We’re listening to each other,” said Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, who has repeatedly visited the communities around the slide, helping guide a transition in tone from disaster response to recovery and reconstruction. “No one in those communities is untouched.”

The impacts are daunting and deep.

A one-mile section of state highway crucial to life in this corner of the North Cascades, about 55 miles northeast of Seattle, lies shattered and buried, with pieces of the yellow divider line carved out and hurled up into the debris field. State engineers said this month in community meetings that they hoped to open a primitive one-lane detour within weeks, but that restoring even partial traffic on the old Route 530, portions of it under 20 feet of mud, was months away at the earliest.

The Stillaguamish River and the streams that fed it in the Oso Valley have shifted into new patterns of flood risk and water quality. Some wells have turned turbid with silt, while others are now bubbling like artesian springs, as the millions of tons of moving earth changed subterranean pressures.

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Residents of Oso, Wash., gathered last week Tuesday at the Oso Community Chapel to discuss the plans for clearing and repairing Route 530. Last month’s landslide destroyed a section of the vital road.CreditMatthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

Perhaps most profound for many people is a new awareness of the dangers of life here, amid crumbly and steep glacial slopes, that is changing the psychology. The Cascades are uniquely prone to slides, as rivers like the Stillaguamish, fed by the wet Pacific Northwest weather, cut through the hundreds of feet of rubble left on the mountaintops when the glaciers retreated. The landslide on March 22 also came after weeks of near-record rain.

“I don’t think it ever felt safe,” said Erika Morris, a resident of Darrington, on the east side of the slide from Oso, as she stared at a map one night last week after a town hall meeting with state and local officials. The map showed old landslides in and around Oso, some dating back perhaps 10,000 years or more, with almost every stretch of the valley marked by a shadow of prior impact.

“This kind of map just shows you,” she said, running a finger down the surface. “These are slides, unstable slopes, glacial till — and things happen.”

Robin Youngblood lost her home in the disaster and says that in a recurring dream she still sees the wall of mud roaring toward her. She said she did not think any residents of Oso, which had a population of about 180 before the landslide, would ever go back and try to rebuild homes or their lives in the area. She has imagined instead a memorial and park there, with perhaps a carved totem pole made from the 100-foot-tall spruce tree near her house that withstood the slide.

“The other half of the mountain is still unstable,” Ms. Youngblood said. “I’m certainly not going to take the risk of going through that again.”

Bruce Cheek, whose home was spared — his was the fourth house from where the mud stopped its rampaging flow on the slide’s western side — raised his hand at a meeting at the Oso Community Chapel and said he thought the disaster was not even over. He lives along the Stillaguamish River, which was prone to flood even before the disaster, he said, and which is cutting a new channel through the debris field.

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Outside the Oso Community Chapel, where residents have mourned their neighbors and discussed plans for the town's future. CreditMatthew Ryan Williams for The New York Times

“What is the river going to do to us?” he asked the state engineers who had posted their maps and charts on the church’s music stands in front of a big golden cross on the wall. “We dodged the first bullet. We may not dodge the second or the third.”

The answer Mr. Cheek got, he said afterward, was not entirely reassuring. The river’s bed was raised 11 feet, the engineers said, and dammed above the slide as well, with resulting changes in flow and behavior that will require years of study.

Small-business owners on both sides of the slide said they worried that state and federal disaster relief efforts, perhaps in sensitivity to the grieving families, might go so slowly that an economic disaster would compound the landslide. With the state highway closed, towns on both edges of the slide — Darrington to the east, Oso and areas of Arlington to the west — have effectively been put on dead-end roads; transit through the corridor during the crucial summer vacation season will not happen this year.

“I think the efforts are caught up in the emotions,” said Carla Hall, 57, the owner of Fruitful Farm, a flower and organic produce market near the slide, where customers, she said, have all but disappeared. Ms. Hall, who pulled Mr. Inslee aside at one of the meetings last week to press her concerns, said that the human losses to Oso and Darrington were horrible and that she had known many of the victims. They would not want an area they loved to fall further into ruin, she said. But she also left the meeting, she said, with a better understanding of the recovery plan’s challenges.

An altered river flood plain, for example, means a new design for the rebuilt state highway, with a dike to hold back water or the construction of elevated sections to raise the roadbed. The two-mile detour through the mountains around the site, much of it along what was a power-line maintenance track, depends on getting approvals from private landowners. Even how much earth must be removed to build a permanent new highway corridor is uncertain; engineers are still calculating how wide a track must be carved out to keep unstable debris from sloughing back onto the roadway.

“There are no simple solutions,” Dan Rankin, Darrington’s mayor, said in an interview at the town’s Community Center after a meeting with residents in the gym. Mr. Rankin, a sawmill owner whose family came to the Cascades in the 1920s, said he worried every day that what was lost that Saturday morning in Oso was only the beginning. “How do we pick up the pieces?” he asked, as volunteers and neighbors came by to say good night.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Leveled by Landslide, Towns Mull How to Rebuild. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe